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EJToday: Top Headlines

EJToday is SEJ's selection of new and outstanding stories on environmental topics in print and on the air, updated every weekday. SEJ also offers a free e-mailed digest of the day's EJToday postings, called SEJ-beat. SEJ members are subscribed automatically, but may opt out here. Non-members may subscribe here. EJToday is also available via RSS feed. Please see Editorial Guidelines for EJToday content.

"Beef Products Inc., the top producer of ammonia-treated beef product dubbed 'pink slime' by critics, said Monday that it had halted production at three of its four plants in three states for 60 days."

"Rich Jochum, corporate administrator for the South Dakota-based company, said the temporary closure could become "a permanent suspension."

"This is a direct reaction to all the misinformation about our lean beef," Jochum said.

The company shut down operations Monday at its plants in Amarillo, Texas; Finney County, Kansas; and Waterloo, Iowa.

"TOKYO -- One of Japan’s crippled nuclear reactors still has fatally high radiation levels and hardly any water to cool it, according to an internal examination Tuesday that renews doubts about the plant’s stability."

"SAN FRANCISCO -- A plan to dig a vast copper mine in arid southern Arizona is pitting the needs of American industry -- and arguably the national economy -- against a coalition of local residents and environmentalists."

"The Environmental Protection Agency will issue the first limits on greenhouse gas emissions from new power plants as early as Tuesday, according to several people briefed on the proposal. The move could end the construction of conventional coal-fired facilities in the United States.

"NEW ORLEANS -- After months of laboratory work, scientists say they can definitively finger oil from BP's blown-out well as the culprit for the slow death of a once brightly colored deep-sea coral community in the Gulf of Mexico that is now brown and dull."

"There is a particularly sensitive accusation reverberating through online discussion boards and social media in Japan: that Emperor Akihito's speech on the one year anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami was censored on TV for his comments about the nuclear disaster at Fukushima."

"OKLAHOMA CITY -- As President Barack Obama pushes to fast-track an oil pipeline from Oklahoma south to the Gulf Coast, an American Indian tribe that calls the oil hub home worries the route might disrupt sacred sites holding the unmarked graves of their ancestors."

"Environmentalists have mounted a legal challenge against Wyoming regulators they say are improperly approving oil and gas companies’ 'overly broad,' boilerplate requests to shield information about the chemicals they use in drilling operations."

"LONDON -- A gas cloud has encircled Total's Elgin Franklin platform in the North Sea after failed attempts to shut a problematic production well caused a leak, an RMT union official said, based on eyewitness accounts from workers on nearby rigs."

"On Monday, the film director and explorer James Cameron became the first human to reach the world’s deepest abyss on his own, the Challenger Deep, which lies 62 miles southwest of Guam in the Pacific Ocean. The dive had been attempted only once before, in 1960, when Don Walsh, a retired United States Navy captain, and Jacques Piccard, a Swiss engineer, reached the spot in the Navy submersible Trieste."

"OTTAWA — The federal government is set to declare a bacteria killer found in many toothpastes, mouthwashes and anti-bacterial soaps as toxic to the environment, a move which could see the use of the chemical curtailed sharply, Postmedia News has learned."